Re: 18:9?

Re: Don't know why...

The accident may have been triggered by a stray piece of cowling, but undoubtedly design flaws allowed it to progress into the loss of the aircraft. Concorde had even had many near misses in her service life that should have been taken more seriously. Such an impact should have been survivable and resulted in nothing more than a go-around and emergency landing. Given that flaw, the story of how Concorde returned to flight afterwards via a seriously impressive piece of shoestring engineering is just as enthralling as the rest of her story - retrofitting the fuel tanks and more to ensure the same accident couldn't happen again. Have a look at http://www.concordesst.com/returntoflight/mods.html.

There are many theories as to what caused her ultimate demise - the BA aircraft were still profitable - as always it probably just boiled down to politics. Sad, I would have loved to have flown on her.

Need more input

I'll add my 0.02 for what its worth. Last year XH558 was doing a pre-season engineering check flight and came by the site I was working at near York. Traffic on the A64 and A19 ground to a halt as people filled the laybys to watch her fly circuits. She literally stopped traffic!

My childhood Vulcan memory (late 80s/very early 90s? Must have been on the verge of leaving service) is from RAF Church Fenton, which had a decent air show in those days. It's the only thing I remember from the day but I remember it vividly, Olympus-induced earthquake and car alarms going off and all. Absolutely awe inspiring. I gladly chucked a few quid in to the VTTS campaign so my name ought to be amongst those on 558's bomb bay door somewhere. Hopefully I can take my three-year-old to see her fly before she's grounded for good, and pay those memories forward a little.

Re: >> removed one of the scientific instruments and installed the corrective device

More than a decade - they started building the High‐Speed Photometer in the 70s. They did manage some success with their science package, though the primary mission was a failure - you can read about it here: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/316334 - the module came back to Earth on board Endeavour and was at least useful in exploring the resilience of flight hardware, and if the rest of the telescope de-orbits it will at least be amongst the hardware that survived the mission.

All is not lost, though - the last Hubble service visit installed a soft capture system (the original plan was to bring the whole telescope home in the back of a shuttle) so a future robotic rescue mission is at least theoretically feasible.

@smartermind doesn't matter if you're male or female. The testes are immunologically privileged - because sperm are haploid and therefore most definitely non-self your body would mount an immune response to your own sperm. This is a cause of some types of inferitility - often following trauma of the eye-watering variety.

Sperm are incredibly sensitive to handling - temperature shock and environment - and get nutritional support from seminal fluid, which obviously wouldn't be present in this application - so it's difficult to see how they would last any length of time in vivo. It's a really interesting idea though!

@S4qFBxkFFg is pretty much right. There's quite a good chance of dog faeces carrying Toxocara canis which is a non-trivial risk to human health. Whereas being the product of an herbivorous digestive system, horse poop is basically pure fertilizer and the only parasite risk is to other horses.

Re: No prions

That's not quite right, or at lease a misunderstanding. While we still don't know precisely what the origin of BSE was, it's a good working hypothesis that Scrapie from sheep was indeed the initial spark (but there are other ideas, such as the endogenous virus hypothesis).

However, the species barrier in transmitting a TSE is immense - so there is very little chance of you receiving a dose of BSE prion that would cause you vCJD, or of a cow receiving a BSE-inducing inoculation from sheep meal - but once it has occurred, there is a much higher chance of then passing on that infectious prion through cannibalism (cf. kuru in man). The problem being that we fed ruminants other ruminants - so-called MBM (meat & bone meal). We only saw it here in the UK first because we changed the way we manufactured MBM at the end of the 70s and apparently the new method did not control the infectious vector.

We KNOW this was an important infection route just from looking at the disease surveillance data - as soon as the feeding ban was brought in around '88 the incidence of BSE in cattle shot down from tens of thousands to almost nothing. In the UK - partially because of this whole sorry affair - we have tremendously active public health surveillance, and as a result of all this effort in 2010-11 there were NO cases of BSE in our national herd. That's quite an achievement.

BUT!

If you were unlucky enough to be infected with vCJD, the duration of the incubation period before the appearance of clinical symptoms would be strongly linked to your genotype: specifically, a methionine/valine polymorphism at codon 129 of the gene coding for the human prion protein.

Human clinical vCJD disease seemed to peak in 2000*, but ALL of these cases were known MM homozygotes. The predction of a 'second vast epidemic' you allude to was because of the potential vulnerability of MV or VV homozygous humans, who were thought to be (and may still be) at risk of developing vCJD.

Re: No prions

That would be precisely what I meant by 'no public health oversight'. Trading meat like any other commodity through an insanely long supply chain across national borders positively invites criminal intervention. Problem is, it's /not/ like any other commodity...

No prions

To all those 'oh noes! Teh mad cows' commenters - there'll be little additional risk from rogue prion diseases (BSE/Scrapie => vCJD) - the relevant tissue is considered specified risk material (SRM) and has to be destroyed by incineration, the legislation covering all this is quite tough (and a good reason to be up in arms about the horse meat scandal even if you don't mind noshing on a bit of pony - where and how those animals were raised, slaughtered and butchered is anyone's guess, you have no idea what welfare issues, diseases and drug residues were present with no public health oversight).

I agree we should practice old fashioned 'nose to tail eating'; no expensively produced protein should be lost form a carcass, but it should not be dressed up as something it's not ('chicken' nuggets etc.).

Grail?

A more seasonal name would have been the High Orbit Lunar Insertion Gravity Recovery and Interior Lab. Not forgetting the science Package, the QUantum Entanglement Search Technology... yes, the QUEST for the HOLI GRAIL...

Title

@RobE who says that's not possible already, not to say has been for centuires? Not in the Doolittle sense. Language is a different thing from communication.

For any human to work effectively with an animal (working dogs, horses etc) the two have got to be able to communicate pretty effectively. Sure, it's possible to - say - beat a horse into submission; but the truly good riders can tell you exactly what their horses are thinking, and work with them in partnership rather than dominance. Man has been doing this kind of thing since the first days of domestication.

And it's not just one way; dogs are remarkably - perhaps uniquely - adept at reading emotion in human faces. Remember how much of our communication is non-verbal. Google 'left-gaze bias in dogs' for more.